Theological Journal – July 24 Lee Camp: Scandalous Witness (6)
PROPOSITION 6 The United States Was Not, Is Not, and Will
Not Be a Christian Nation
The article excerpted below, by historian Kristin Du Mez,
nice sums up Camp’s first six propositions.
Os Guinness, Eric Metaxas, and Their Dangerous Myths of American
History
On June 1, President Trump cleared peaceful protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets in order to pose with a bible by a church. This act spoke directly to his base, which includes a large number of white evangelical Christians, and it validated false Christian histories of America that many of them accept. For too many people today, America can be great only if it is Christian, and it can be Christian only if it was founded by evangelical figures on the basis of biblical principles.
This view of a biblical
nation is widespread and seems to be rising, partly in reaction to protests and
undertakings like The 1619 Project. Not long before Donald
Trump’s awkward pose, for example, the prominent evangelical Os Guinness gave
a lecture stereotyping the American
Revolution as “biblical” and the French Revolution as secular. Such an account
cannot make sense of the actual actors and factors that went into each,
as John Fea—a Christian historian—explains. But
Os Guinness is only a part-time partaker in these mythic histories. David
Barton is the most full-time falsifier of the American founding, but Eric Metaxas remains
the most popular. According to Metaxas, for example, John Adams was “a
committed and theologically orthodox Christian,” though in reality Adams denied
the Trinity and the deity of Christ.
The histories of America
posited by Metaxas and others like him contain a multitude of errors, as plenty
of historians have pointed out. But where the historical problems are obvious,
the theological dangers in their methods can often be harder to spot. So let me
identify three.
First, these histories of
America represent a failure of love. For far too long, accounts of the American
founding touted by too many white evangelicals have tended to erase, ignore, or
downplay slavery, injustice, and oppression. As a result, the story of racial
minorities in America—including faithful non-white Christians, many of whom are
keeping Christianity alive in America—get written out of our nation’s past. It
is hard to love others while refusing to listen to them, and Christian
nationalist histories are, in large measure, a refusal to listen—an
unwillingness to reckon with the hard truths that haunt the past and present of
so many in America today. When Os Guinness calls the American Constitution
“biblical,” for example, he fails to acknowledge that the Constitution
officially recognized the legality of slavery and ensured its survival for
another seven decades.
American history is not a
tale only of failure and oppression and abuse; but it is also not a tale only
of freedom, achievement, and success. Only when we begin to see the
multiplicity and complexity of history can we begin to understand how God moves
in it and through it, and how we, in the present, can and should
respond—righting wrongs and attempting to shine a light in dark places. The
gospel depends not on the power of the government or our ability to claim
political influence at any cost. It depends on the grace of God, which calls on
the church to act as the Body of Christ. And a church divided by false
histories of our country cannot be the force of healing this world needs.
Second, the histories that
undergird Christian nationalism position the United States as the savior of the
world. On this telling, government institutions and political parties are more
significant actors than the church. Taking political power or retaining it
becomes the highest priority. Politicians become the guardians of the gospel.
The president violently disperses peaceful protestors to wield a bible above
his head.
This replacement of the
church with the nation has a long history. Its favorite expression is the idea
of America as a “city on a hill,” a biblical phrase (Matthew 5:14) that
referred almost exclusively to the church throughout most of American
history—until, during the Cold War, scholars like Perry Miller and politicians
like Ronald Reagan coopted it for the country.
If “city on a hill” is the
latest version of this idolatry, its purest form comes in a 1909 sermon by the social gospel minister
Washington Gladden. Preaching to the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions, Gladden explained that God’s promises “are made to the nation
and not to the church.” Identifying the United States as the New Israel, he
claimed that the truest evangelists were American politicians. “There have been
great preachers of the gospel, great missionaries of the cross,” he preached,
“but few, I believe, who have presented the principles of our religion to the
non-Christian world more convincingly than William McKinley and John Hay and
John W. Foster and Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root and William H. Taft.”
Whenever the nation becomes blended as one with the church, politicians become
the priests of God’s kingdom. Those who believe in Christian nationalism seem
to think that the gospel hinges on the government.
Finally, beyond a lack of
love and a dangerous idolatry, Christian nationalists ultimately undercut their
own faith by failing to trust in the sovereignty of God. Essentially, their
histories of America tell God how he should have acted, rather
than examining how he did. David Barton and Eric Metaxas seem to think that
evangelicals should have founded the United States. And so, in
their telling, they did, regardless of historical records. Their histories, in
other words, treat God as an incapable sovereign. Since God couldn’t be trusted
to get things right, Barton and Metaxas will take matters into their own hands,
rewriting history to mop up God’s mistakes. Theirs is a clean version of the
American founding, unblemished by all that still marks and mars society today .
. .
The dangers of Christian
nationalism for both Christianity and the nation mount with each rewriting of
the American past. If Christians are to be committed to both truth and love,
then we must commit to as true and full a history of the nation as we can tell,
loving our fellow citizens, refusing to worship a false image of the nation,
and trusting, finally, in a sovereign God.
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